It’s an exhibition of reworked, reimagined & regurgitated Mona Lisas by artists, illustrators, designers and of course a plethora of cartoonists (mostly of this parish)

The highly acclaimed pizza restaurant ‘A Casa Mia’ next door to the gallery has even joined in with a ‘Mona Pizza’ which is available on their menu while the exhibition is running. ‘Delizioso’ as Leonardo would’ve said.

The fifth Herne Bay Cartoon Festival is under way, and this year the event features a change of venue for its main live event and a guest appearance by one of the UK’s top political cartoonists.

After four years at the town’s Bandstand, the live event will be held on the bustling Herne Bay Pier.

More than 20 of the UK’s top cartoonists will be there on Sunday 6 August from midday to draw big-board cartoons, seaside peep boards, caricatures and more. There will also be a few surprises and chances for the public to get involved with drawing.

The change of location has inspired the title of the main festival exhibition, The End of the Pier Show, which opened this week at the Beach Creative gallery and runs until Sunday 13 August.

An exhibition by the political cartoonist Martin Rowson also opened this week at the Bay Art Gallery. It also runs until Sunday 13 August.

Also open now at the Seaside Museum is the exhibition Cartoonists All At Sea, a selection of cartoons from the British Cartoon Archive in Canterbury, which runs until Sunday 10 September.

As has happened since the third festival, there will be a “fringe” event organised by Glenn Marshall. This year it is Mona Lisa – Not Happy, which sees the da Vinci painting “reworked, reimagined and regurgitated” by Marshall and other cartoonists and artists. The show opens at the One New Street gallery on Friday 4 August and runs until Saturday 2 September.

A key element of the End of the Pier Show exhibition — which features Steve Bell (Guardian), Dave Brown (Independent) and Jeremy Banx(Financial Times) alongside dozens of cartoonists seen in magazines such as Private Eye and The Spectator — are the “Fake Cartoons”, the festival cartoonists’ take on the fake news phenomenon that has emerged over recent years. Expect more than a few appearances by Donald Trump.

To celebrate its fifth year, the festival is awarding a £250 cash prize, which it has dubbed the Paul Dacre Prize — after the Daily Mail editor who recently railed against a Rowson cartoon about the Finsbury Park Mosque attack, below — to the most provocative, unusual or offensive topical cartoon submitted for the exhibition.

Workshops for budding cartoonists will also be held as part of the festival. Royston Robertson and Des Buckley host one at Beach Creative this Saturday (29 July) from 2.30pm-4pm.

And on Saturday 5 August, from 12-1.30pm, The Surreal McCoy will host the Eaten Fish Family Cartoon Workshop. Inspired by the Rossetti Room show it will be “a fishy exploration into all things fish”.

In the first of what we hope will be a regular feature, Jane Mattimoe packs her Case for Pencils and crosses The Big Pond to interview British cartoonists, starting with Ralph Steadman:

I have been interviewing New Yorker cartoonists about their art supplies and drawing process on my blog, A Case for Pencils, since 2014. I had started going into The New Yorker close to two years prior, almost every week, and had gotten to meet a lot of my cartooning heroes. Not having had much of an art background (I studied anthropology at university), I began asking for advice about cartooning. To my delight, legends such as Sam Gross, Sid Harris, Mort Gerberg, and George Booth were kind and gracious enough to put up with my pestering… I realized that there were probably many aspiring cartoonists who would be interested in hearing and learning from their artist heroes as well, and began giving cartoonists surveys to fill out, to be collected on a website. And that’s how A Case for Pencils was born.

The great man’s studio

By now you may have guessed that I am an American, a transgression which I hope you can forgive me for if I tell you that I met Pro Cartoonists’ Organisation committee member, The Surreal McCoy, years ago at the offices of The New Yorker, and have been delighted to get to know more PCO members, such as Jonesy and Glenn Marshall online. Surreal McCoy reached out to me to invite me to interview PCO members about their art supplies and drawing process similarly to the way that I do on Case, and here is the tremendously buried lede— I said yes! So starting with Ralph Steadman, there will be monthly (?) interviews where we will talk pencils and pens!

I am not a professional journalist. Most interviews on Case are conducted via email correspondence, and in fact, I have only done one telephone interview. So when Ralph suggested we speak via skype, I was a bit nervous. He also mentioned that it would be his third interview in so many days, and from the sounds of the other publications he was speaking with, I had some tough acts to follow! Fortunately, immediately upon starting the interview, I learned that Ralph is one of the warmest and kindest people you could ever meet! We ended up talking for close to two hours, and he made me laugh so often, that the muscles in my face were sore the day after!

A Case for Pencils’ Jane Mattimoe

Talking to Ralph was a dream come true (though my webcam insisted on presenting me to him as a technicolor nightmare of flashing rainbow hues!) and I am grateful to PCO for the opportunity. They say to never meet your heroes, but that maxim doesn’t hold true at all with Ralph. It was fun to hear his associative mind in action– he’d talk about something “swimming in ink,” and then he’d connect swimming to his morning exercise regimen (he recommends the breastroke as the best form of swimming) that he does to keep his lungs in full working order, which led to him remembering a television program he watched the previous morning, where many people who had experienced being brought back to life’s last thought before having been resuscitated was “I can’t breathe.” Initially, some of his answers might seem like they don’t directly answer my questions, but what he actually is doing is leaping forward via associations, a thinking talent which contributes to his being one of the most creative and successful visual artists. Such as he avoids rough drafts in his art, he often goes straight to his final point (or association).

Besides just my bonkers webcam, we experienced many technical difficulties throughout the interview (though, Ralph, I know that one of the times that Skype “froze,” you were just sitting very still!). Fortunately, knowing in advance that my various electronic gadgets are what is known in the professional cartooning community as “very bad,” I prepared for the worst, and set up three separate methods to record the interview. That may seem excessive, but considering that two out of the three devices utterly quit, and erased their audio recording midway through the interview, it turned out to be the perfect amount!

Upon hearing that I had so many devices working to record us, Ralph exclaimed, “Oh it will be a collage!” an idea that prompted me to include snippets of our emails, a clip of audio, and screenshots of our skype session in the final interview. Ralph was more than game to build up the piece, and and very kindly sent me loads of his work to pepper throughout the paragraphs. Our resulting interview, which you can read on A Case for Pencils, is a kaleidoscope view of the time we talked.

In celebration of another glorious summer of English cricket, that well known champion of cartooning, Chris Beetles Gallery, is presenting “Leather on Willow”, an exhibition of over 175 cricketing watercolours, oils, cartoons and illustrations.

Political cartoonist Clay Jones’ initial delight upon receiving a citation in Iran’s House of Cartoon “Trumpism Cartoon and Caricature Contest” rapidly diminished as he learned more about the organisers’ track record.

“I have an issue with a contest sponsored by the government of Iran that’s critical of free speech in the United States when they don’t allow freedom of speech, or freedom for the press in their nation,” Jones writes on his blog. “I have an issue with a contest that was a wolf whistle for anti-Semitism.

“Though the Trumpism contest wasn’t about any of that, it’s not a party I would accept an invitation to. If the Ku Klux Klan held a cartoon contest on economics, I wouldn’t want to enter, and I don’t want to be involved with a group that engages in anti-Semitism, no matter how their denial may be worded.”

The anti-Semitism Jones refers to is Iran’s House of Cartoon Holocaust cartoon contest. Despite the completely unacceptable nature of this competition FECO (Federation of Cartoonists Organisation) continued to collaborate with Iran’s House of Cartoon, causing the PCO, along with France-Cartoons, to terminate our membership.

To celebrate the launch of “The Inking Woman – British Women Cartoon and Comic Artists”, the current exhibition at The Cartoon Museum, London, three of the participants talk about their work and love of the medium. Alex Fitch talks to Sandi Toksvig, a patron of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation, and to artist The Surreal McCoy who was the artist in residence during The Sound of Sandi on LBC Radio and a cartoonist for The Sunday Times and The Independent.

Also, in an extract from a talk given at Central St. Martin’s School of Art, Rachael House discusses her involvement with the queer ‘zine movement over the last twenty years and beyond.

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Disclaimer: Any opinion expressed here is that of the named individual and not that of the UK Professional Cartoonists' Organisation unless explicitly stated. Artwork attributed to a named author or publication on this diary should be noted by anyone linking to us from any other site. Thank you. If you wish to reproduce an image please contact the artist from here.